"God says don't look."
I know this has
already been covered, but the kind of people that make it to the top of their respective cultural promontories, in American society,
continue to astound.
On Sunday, Ken Ham, president and founder of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis (best known for debating Bill Nye), wrote a blog post calling for the end of the U.S. space program.
Why? Well, according to Ham, who also runs the Creation Museum in Kentucky, there’s no point in spending money on finding extraterrestrial life for a couple of reasons: First, the search is a deliberate rebuking of God, and second because aliens are already damned to hell.
We've already peeved God by discovering that dinosaurs existed and that the sun does not, in fact, revolve around the Earth. Now we're going to go out and discover alien species?
Non-Christian alien species? Microbes on Europa that were never given the gift of salvation? No, sir, we must engage our maximal level of eyes shutting, lest we see
that. We may have to use glue or staples, just so none of us are temped to peek.
The logic here, though, is just stellar. I mean it; this needs to go in a history book. We need a monument commissioned to this statement, because when human life eventually wipes itself out in its aggressive bid to privatize breathing, we'll want to leave something for future heathen space microbes to remember us by.
Below the fold:
“And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel,” Ham wrote. “You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. [...]”
“Jesus did not become the ‘GodKlingon’ or the ‘GodMartian’! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior,” Ham continues. “In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word). To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.”
Oh yeah, that's the stuff. But does the Bible really make that clear? I never quite read it that way, but then I never sussed out where it described dinosaur saddles either so I am clearly unable to comprehend the mysteries of the Right-Wing God. Maybe the microbes on Europa had their own microbe Jesus. Maybe on some other planet a sentient apple tree ate Eve. Maybe it's all a complex allegory from a very long time ago and is not meant to bar all future quests for knowledge thousands of years later under the premise that God doesn't want you finding any of that stuff out.
What puzzles me—and there's a South Park to this effect, so it's not an original thought—is that one would think hard-right evangelical Christians would be giddy at the prospect of alien life. The sole purpose of evangelicalism is to find people who don't know about Jesus, declare war on them as infidels, destroy their culture and convert them to—sorry, I mean To Bring Them The Good News. Imagine the size of the cloud you'd get in the afterlife for being the person who brought the gospel to the overweight lizard people of Omicron Persei Eight. But how far does this logic extend? Does Ken Ham consider the discovery of the Americas or Australia to be a grave sin against his God? We found nothing but non-Christians there, after all. What of the exploration of the ocean floor? We found species there we never knew of, species that never once attended Sunday School or donated to a conservative preacher during a loud and sweaty telethon—did God forgive us for discovering those creatures, or did we screw ourselves as soon as the boat left the dock? Knowing that there is water on Mars—science, or devil work?
The wonderful thing about Ken Ham and other creationist-flavored prophets of their one and only True Way is that the same non-logic can, and is, applied to everything. We accept that gravity exists, but the notion of what revolves around what is still touchy in certain quarters. A stethoscope might be all right, but God may not like vaccinations because reasons. God loves acoustic guitars, but hates electric guitars—the list is endless. You can make up whatever you like according to your own preferences and prejudices, and Ken Ham does, and other people have other theories, all of them contradictory, and every last one of them is sure that even trying to prove them wrong is a one-way ticket to a fiery pit.
It's an object lesson, that's what it is. Ken Ham was put on this earth so that the rest of us would say there, but for the grace of God, go I. If you believe you personally know all the answers, then you are declaring that you yourself are God, or at least his only true emissary, and that sounds considerably more sketchy than looking through a telescope and wondering what else might be out there.
